Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤

If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
10/10

Thank you for blessing me with this fact today 😂

I thought so too! Meant to do a quick google search and ended up reading about her for an hour 🤷‍♀️

Sources:
-https://communities.springernature.com/posts/the-women-in-the-mouse-business
-https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966381/
-https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)60108-0/fulltext

Lathrop’s scientific legacy is rarely acknowledged, but it should be. She was a scientist and #WomanInSTEM in her own right, and we have much to thank her for today!

Together, this work contributed to the discovery of estrogen receptors nearly 35 years later.

Lathrop went on to pass away of pernicious anemia at 50 years old- a condition that was rendered less fatal through discoveries made in animal models only a short time later.

Together, Lathrop and Loeb confirmed that these tumours were strain-specific, and that females with ovarectomies developed tumours at a lower rate than female mice who underwent pregnancy, linking them to sex hormones.

As Lathrop ramped up her breeding program in the early 1900s to support scientific research, she noticed that some of her in-bred strains developed cancerous lesions. She worked with pathologist Leo Loeb from @upenn.edu starting in 1910.

In fact, one of the most ubiquitous mouse strains used in modern research, the C57Bl/6J mouse, was derived from one of Lathrop’s original breeders (mouse #57).

In 1902, he ordered mice from Lathrop for use in his work, kickstarting her business as a major supplier to scientific laboratories. One of Castle’s mentees, Clarence Cook Little, would later go on to found Jackson Labs, a major scientific supplier of laboratory mice today.

As her business grew, she employed numerous other neighbourhood women.

Lathrop’s detailed record keeping and diligent work caught the notice of a new client: William E. Castle, a @harvard.edu geneticist who was exploring Mendel’s ideas in mammalian models.

She began breeding mice and other rodents for fanciers, collectors who prized unique coat colours and characteristics across different strains. Lathrop kept meticulous records in order to selectively breed for certain traits, eventually housing over 11,000 mice on her farm.

We often talk about the impact of Gregor Mendel’s work on modern genetics, yet the impact of Abbie Lathrop’s work rarely comes up in this conversation. Born in 1868, Abbie Lathrop retired from school teaching at 32 due to chronic illness.

I really really enjoyed this episode. Keep up the amazing work, Science Vs! A highlight of my week is listening to Wendy and the team.